REST as understood by Fielding is useful when you have a highly heterogeneous, connected set of things your clients and servers operate on, like websites or a g

REST as understood by Fielding is useful when you have a highly heterogeneous, connected set of things your clients and servers operate on, like websites or a government intelligence system. These sorts of domains are pretty uncommon. It's far more than just an extra layer of indirection to keep backwards compatibility; in practice, you can't change HTTP-layer APIs regardless of your hypermedia controls. People bookmark things and write curl scripts.